Guitar Rig 4

[darkandrew]

I've had Guitar Rig 4 for a few years (it came with the NI Komplete bundle) but have never really used it. Anyway, I had some spare time this evening so I sat down and had a play around with it and I'm not sure. My impression is that it's not horrifically bad and it's not "My God, how have I ever managed without this" good either. To be honest, most of the modelling sounds very similar to my Pod X3 but I still prefer my old Boss GT6 - it just feels more responsive and smoother (but then I suppose some people prefer the grit of the Pod). Has anybody played around with Guitar Rig and managed to get good sounds out of it or am I wasting my time?

[Angel]

I've had GR2, 3 & 4. I first got it when all the mags raved about it's brilliance, but to be honest I've found it disappointing. I like to use gain type sounds with a guitar, and they all seem to have horrible amounts of hiss. The noise gates etc just seem to kill the tone dead with that horrible clipping. Didn't like any of the bass sounds and I've never felt bothered to tweak them either. If they could cure the hiss I would love it.

It's OK for other types of sounds.

[Kiwi]

I have GR3 Kontrol. I don't use it for high gain effects and have found it pretty good. Having unlimited processing power has provided a lot of freedom for experimentation and some of the patches I've ended up copying onto my MPXG2. The high gain settings are noisy though and if you have a laptop which is used for other things, the processing time can delay the signal a little. I've seen it being used live but am not sure I'd use anything other than a dedicated non-internet laptop for that purpose.

[tonyquipment]

I've got GR5 on my main machine, love it.

Simple to use and is literally plug and play. Very little wires and messing to get a good sound. Fun to mess and experiment with.

[Mornats]

All of the tracks on my Soundcloud page (link in my signature) were recorded using Guitar RIg 4 and more recently Guitar Rig 5 Pro. I've got a gaming PC that use for audio work so there's no lag anywhere and no interference. I've not had problems with hiss and high gain either IIRC. I use the Guitar RIg Session audio interface so maybe this cuts it down? I've always liked Guitar Rig and find it very easy to use and to get good results out of. It's a lot more geared towards guitar than bass though. Only one bass amp (because bassists are not gearheads at all now are we...) but it's ok and does the job.

I've also got Ampeg SVX which to be honest I really struggle with. Everything seems overly distorted or very quiet and I just can't get a good recorded sound. Guitar Rig is much better for me, at least until I figure out what I'm doing wrong with Ampeg.

I can't compare it to something like a Pod as I've not used one for recording but I bought myself a Zoom B.9 yesterday which I'll try out to see how it fares.

I don't think you're wasting your time with it. I find it incredibly useful to go back and apply different settings and amp modelling to an already recorded track of mine. I guess if you're recording using a Pod or other hardware amp modeller then you can't apply different settings post-recording? You can also use Guitar Rig effects on other instruments. I quite often apply Little Reflektor or some of the other effects to piano tracks from Kontakt or to the drums in EZ drummer (to get the same type of reverb on but at a volume/mix that's individual to the instrument).

[1976fenderhead]

[quote name='Mornats' timestamp='1359317578' post='1953055']
I've also got Ampeg SVX which to be honest I really struggle with. Everything seems overly distorted or very quiet and I just can't get a good recorded sound. Guitar Rig is much better for me, at least until I figure out what I'm doing wrong with Ampeg.
[/quote]

Funny you say that because I've just tried Amplitube 3 and had the same experience: really hard not to clip the only bass amp model the free version provides. I had to read the manual to understand all the different stages of volume they have - there's not only input and output volume for the patch, but also input gain which [i]adds[/i] to the gain in your audio interface and comes at 6dB by default! They recommend playing with the volumes until you find a good balance leaving input gain at 6dB but I found that was a pain and turning input gain to 2dB made the whole thing work much better for me. I also had to turn on the pad in my interface.

I really tried to like Amplitube because I like the expandability with loads of brand-approved models (though amps and cabs work out quite expensive), but ended up dropping it because of this tiny bit of latency that I always hear in my playing even setting buffer size at minimum when it starts glitching... It never sounds like it's responding fast enough to my playing!

Between this and Guitar Rig's only bass amp, no matter how much I've tried to like them I always ended up reverting to POD Farm: not perfect but at least I can't notice any inherent latency, volumes always work fine and the interface feels much more intuitive than the others (I find Amplitube a little overcomplicated for my needs, especially in the mic part). Plus, I already have all the models anyway

[Mornats]

[quote name='1976fenderhead' timestamp='1359338609' post='1953342']
Funny you say that because I've just tried Amplitube 3 and had the same experience: really hard not to clip the only bass amp model the free version provides. I had to read the manual to understand all the different stages of volume they have - there's not only input and output volume for the patch, but also input gain which [i]adds[/i] to the gain in your audio interface and comes at 6dB by default! They recommend playing with the volumes until you find a good balance leaving input gain at 6dB but I found that was a pain and turning input gain to 2dB made the whole thing work much better for me. I also had to turn on the pad in my interface.
[/quote]

Ah nice one, I suspected there was some gain boost going on in there as Guitar Rig never gave me problems with levels. I'll give that a whirl, cheers